With the beginning of June, we were operating nearly thirty wells.  In some cases two vaqueros could hoist all the water that accumulated in three wells.  We had a string of camps along the river, and at every windmill on the mesas men were stationed night and day.  Among the cattle, the death rate was increasing all over the range.  Frequently we took over a hundred skins in a single day, while at every camp cords of fallen flint hides were accumulating.  The heat of summer was upon us, the wind arose daily, sand storms and dust clouds swept across the country, until our once prosperous range looked like a desert, withered and accursed.  Young cows forsook their offspring in the hour of their birth.  Motherless calves wandered about the range, hollow-eyed, their piteous appeals unheeded, until some lurking wolf sucked their blood and spread a feast to the vultures, constantly wheeling in great flights overhead.  The prickly pear, an extremely arid plant, affording both food and drink to herds during drouths, had turned white, blistered by the torrid sun until it had fallen down, lifeless.  The chaparral was destitute of foliage, and on the divides and higher mesas, had died.  The native women stripped their jacals of every sacred picture, and hung them on the withered trees about their doors, where they hourly prayed to their patron saints.  In the humblest homes on Las Palomas, candles burned both night and day to appease the frowning Deity.

The white element on the ranch worked almost unceasingly, stirring the Mexicans to the greatest effort.  The middle of June passed without a drop of rain, but on the morning of the twentieth, after working all night, as Pasquale Arispe and I were drawing water from a well on the border of the encinal I felt a breeze spring up, that started the windmill.  Casting my eyes upward, I noticed that the wind had veered to a quarter directly opposite to that of the customary coast breeze.  Not being able to read aright the portent of the change in the wind, I had to learn from that native-born son of the soil:  “Tomas,” he cried, riding up excitedly, “in three days it will rain!  Listen to me:  Pasquale Arispe says that in three days the arroyos on the hacienda of Don Lancelot will run like a mill-race.  See, companero, the wind has changed.  The breeze is from the northwest this morning.  Before three days it will rain!  Madre de Dios!”

The wind from the northwest continued steadily for two days, relieving us from work.  On the morning of the third day the signs in sky and air were plain for falling weather.  Cattle, tottering with weakness, came into the well, and after drinking, playfully kicked up their heels on leaving.  Before noon the storm struck us like a cloud-burst.  Pasquale and I took refuge under the wagon to avoid the hailstones.  In spite of the parched ground drinking to its contentment, water flooded under the wagon, driving us out.  But we laughed at the violence of the deluge, and